The Bump and the Hollow of Thomas Hart Benton

“American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood,” at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts (where it is evidently unlawful to operate a business whose name does not incorporate a reference to witches), is a big, imaginative, even fun exhibition—one of those shows that start out being interesting for one reason and end up being interesting for a completely different one.

You could say that Thomas Hart Benton represents the direction that modern art didn’t go in, except that he is one of the artists responsible for the direction it did go. He was a populist (first of a left-wing, later of a right-wing variety), a regionalist, and a representationalist in an era, from 1920 on (he died, still working, in 1975), when art was programmatically making itself élitist, internationalist, and abstract. But he was the leading American practitioner of a major twentieth-century art form, the mural, and what might be called mural-type painting—painting that tells a story.

Benton crammed his works with what the abstractionists would take out: information. The problem of representing information visually is an aesthetic problem. You have to address the same issues of scale, selection, composition, proportion, and harmony when you’re making a graph as you do when you’re painting a picture. You’re molding data to make what is essentially pictorial sense.

The show’s curators, led by Austen Barron Bailly, asked themselves what other medium was facing the challenge of conveying information by images when Benton was starting out, and their answer was: cinema. The exhibition interlaces Benton’s canvases and drawings with clips from the movies, and it makes a good case for seeing the similarities between the paintings, with their stylized use of light and modelling, and silent films, with their tableau-vivant stagings.

Painting and film both had to overcome the limitation of flatness. Benton took a lot of pride in his technical solution to this difficulty. He called his method “the bump and the hollow,” and he published a multipart article on it, “Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting,” in Arts magazine, in 1926 and 1927. It became his signature compositional look: it’s how you know you’re looking at a Benton. His paintings, whatever their subject matter, are structured as rows of highly contoured forms, with exaggerated chiaroscuro to mimic three-dimensionality. His practice was to create a complete maquette of the scene he wanted to paint (some of these are in the exhibition), light it dramatically, and then copy it onto the canvas.

Probably Benton’s best painting is one of his earliest, “People of Chilmark,” from 1920, which is placed near the entrance to the exhibition—a frieze-like entanglement of bodies at play. But Benton wanted his paintings to be epic. And, in 1920, he began to produce a sequence of scenes depicting stages in the European conquest of the continent, big paintings, all of which are in the show. He was working in a strong cultural current. By the middle of the nineteen-thirties, with the popularity of Mexican muralists (Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco, David Siqueiros), the proliferation of W.P.A.-sponsored public art, and the faith that history has a meaning—that there is a story there—the mural would become a mode of political poetry, a popular way of representing the multiplicity of life and the march of time.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a work that Benton painted for Life. In 1937, the magazine sent him to Hollywood on commission to paint a “movie mural.” He went around the studios at Twentieth-Century Fox with his sketch pad and ended up with a big painting, called “Hollywood,” in which he tried to capture all the backstage activity of a movie studio inside a single frame. (The actual movie in production was “In Old Chicago.”)

It’s an illustration, not a work of art. And this is the interesting turn in the show—the devolution of Benton’s work from something not unlike Picasso’s in his neo-classical period to something not unlike, and often inferior to, N. C. Wyeth or Norman Rockwell. Key to the transformation are Benton’s scary Second World War paintings, kitschy and stunningly racist pieces of Allied propaganda. Artistically, they are equivalent to the covers of mass-market paperback fantasy fiction.

By then, Benton had left New York, which he thought was overrun with Communists, and returned to his home state, Missouri—replacing one provincialism with another. He made pictures that were used as posters promoting movies like John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Kentuckian,” starring Burt Lancaster. And he continued to turn out illustrations of Americana.

Benton’s art did have a major influence, and that, of course, was through the person of Jackson Pollock. Pollock was close to Benton from 1930, when Pollock was eighteen and had newly arrived in New York City, until 1935, when Benton left for Missouri. He emulated, unconvincingly, a lot of Benton’s swagger. But he also did his best to master the bump and hollow.

Pollock left a number of paintings from that period that are in plain imitation of Benton. But, as Henry Adams (not that Henry Adams), in his recent book “Tom and Jack,” and others have argued, even in Pollock’s drip paintings, you can see the elements of Benton’s organizational scheme: vertical rows wrapped in swirls of form. None of Pollock’s abstract paintings is more Bentonian in design than the breakthrough work known as “Mural,” which Pollock painted in 1943 and which was recently restored and is now on world tour. (It belongs to the University of Iowa Museum of Art, in Iowa City.)

LeRoy Neiman, the sports artist, who painted scenes from prizefights and the like for television, was probably the last successful painter in the Benton mold. (He died in 2012.) The idea of using the visual arts for documentary purposes seems pretty much dead, another victim of the age of mechanical reproduction.

But a visitor to the Peabody Essex Museum can stroll down the street (one visitor did stroll down the street, anyway) and drop in on the Salem Witch Museum. Such a person might, without reflecting on the matter, expect to see artifacts from the witch trials. But, of course, no such artifacts are on display. The trials and executions took place in 1692. What you are treated to instead is a set of thirteen dioramas, separately lighted, each a three-dimensional scene from the story of the witch hunt. A spooky recorded voiceover takes you through the narrative. It’s kind of cheesy, but it’s history told in pictures, like a Benton.

Louis Menand has been a staﬀ writer at The New Yorker since 2001. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016.